The London Handel pageant has at all times supplied loads of alternatives to listen to the composer’s music in his personal church, St George’s, Hanover Sq.. However this yr, like final, probably the most fascinating occasion takes audiences someplace unfamiliar: to Trinity Buoy Wharf this time, an previous storehouse on a windswept Docklands financial institution simply throughout from the O2. As an non-obligatory further you may even journey there by boat, serenaded by an oboe-bassoon quartet. As you put together to disembark, the self-esteem of Jack Furness’s manufacturing begins to kick in. The charming onboard host seems to be the assistant director of a movie firm, right here to provide us a mild heads-up about his boss earlier than we sit in on a shoot – for a movie of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo. He’s visionary however unstable, we’re warned. Issues might get heated.
And so they do, gratifyingly so, because of the riveting performances Furness will get from his solid – three singers, plus the actor Durassie Kiangangu because the assistant. The bullying director we’re warned about is Polifemo – a lustful cyclops within the legendary story Handel was retelling – and his victims are his two stars. The drama unfolds round and inside the movie shoot, in entrance of us and onscreen, by way of handheld digicam. The movie and a translation of the Italian textual content are projected on to an enormous double door which, in a gesture that appears nearly magical in context, slides open to let Galatea the ocean nymph – or maybe the singer enjoying her – stroll out into the darkness, the water and the twinkling lights past.
It’s all a bit meta, and by the point we’re watching a movie of the movie of the character in entrance of us this could by rights all be disappearing up itself. But, as designed by Francis O’Connor and lit by Emma Chapman, it’s so stylishly accomplished that it really works. Furthermore, the rehearsals and retakes of the movie shoot present neat context for Handel’s da capo arias, during which the second a part of the tune is adopted by a repeat of the primary, typically with extra intense ornament: the clapperboard snaps, and – as soon as extra, with feeling.
The solid is great. Mary Bevan and Claudia Huckle are Aci and his/her lover, Bevan’s soprano gleaming, Huckle’s mezzo lusciously expressive. Polifemo is the bass Callum Thorpe, his voice imposing within the villainous bluster and shifting in his moments of despair. The one draw back to the setup is that the band and singers do at instances get briefly uncoupled – an additional digicam, this one on the conductor, might need helped. Nonetheless, this detracts little from the vigorous enjoying of the London Handel Orchestra, carried out from the harpsichord by Laurence Cummings. That is Cummings’s twenty fifth and ultimate season because the LHF’s musical director, and he’s going out on a excessive.
